The Oral History Of ‘Nicktoons’, Part III: Exploring The Multigenerational Appeal Of ‘Rugrats’

It’s remarkable that Rugrats, a show about talking babies, could elicit such adult situations behind the scenes.

There was the in-fighting between the original writing staff and co-creator Arlene Klasky (which resulted in no less than a contentious 1998 New Yorker article and an open letter from said staff to the LA Times). There was the infamous Passover episode that rankled the Anti-Defamation League due to their contention that Grandpa Boris and Grandma Minka evoked Nazi-esque caricatures of Jewish people (despite the fact that nearly everyone involved in the show was Jewish and felt they were largely representing their own grandparents/parents). There was the constant questioning of emotional intensity (How mean could they make Angelica? How sad could the episode of Chuckie dealing with his dead mother on Mother’s Day be?).

It was, at times, a veritable madhouse over there at Klasky-Csupo (where The Simpsons was simultaneously being animated). And yet, there the show was in all its delightful, quirky and downright odd glory.

Rugrats was the quintessence of “transgenerational programming,” perhaps more so than any other series before or since. Again, it’s an animated series about damn babies … that teenagers and older adults could (and did in droves) enjoy, too.

The series set the stage for a winning formula, one which the likes of Pixar (at their best) would adhere to in creating similarly transgenerational material (not to be confused with cloying “family-friendly” fare, mind you; that’s just a marketing euphemism for mindless, unimaginative dreck).

Yes, babies. But consider that fantastic opening sequence brimming with otherworldly camera angles (created almost single-handedly by virtuosic animator Peter Chung, who would later go on to create Aeon Flux). How about that indelible music by none other than Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh (with Dennis Hannigan, a little known fact)?

Remember: This was well before Mothersbaugh became a shining star in the firmament of television and film scores, including just about every single Wes Anderson flick. Co-creator Gabor Csupo (who was busy toiling away on an even more fantastically fucked-up cartoon called Duckman) was simply a big Mothersbaugh fan. The same Csupo who would go on to create, amongst other things, the cover art for close friend Frank Zappa’s The Lost Episodes album.

All of this, all of these people — including co-creator Paul Germain, who pretty much ran the show during its first (and to many fans, best) 65 episode run and was also integral to the creation of The Simpsons — worked to spawn a cartoon about babies.

And here’s how it all happened …

GABOR CSUPO (Co-Creator): We were asked by Nickelodeon to come up with a few ideas for shows, and Arlene came up with the idea of talking babies. She was just having kids and was thinking about what they were doing and seeing.

PAUL GERMAIN (Co-Creator): The day before the pitch with Nickelodeon, Arlene came to me and said, “I think we should do a show about babies.” I went away wondering what I could do with that. What about babies? I went to bed and right before I fell asleep, I started thinking about when my younger brother came home from the hospital, lying in his bed, drooling and making goofy noises. I thought to myself back then, “He can’t be this stupid. I wonder if he’s faking me out. I wonder if when I leave the room, he becomes cognizant.” I thought that was a neat idea and wondered what it would mean for a series. I know Gabor was at the pitch meeting and Arlene may have been there. I’m pitching [Vice President of Animation] Vanessa [Coffey] all of these ideas, and she’s not liking anything I’m pitching. The last thing I pitched was…

VANESSA COFFEY (Vice President of Animation, Nickelodeon): …“What about life from a baby’s point of view?” One of the segments in my Thanksgiving Special [the first original Nickelodeon Animation production] was going to be “Thanksgiving through the eyes of an infant.” So I was like, “Let’s do it.”

PAUL GERMAIN (Co-Creator): The name Rugrats came to me because it was a Navy term that those guys used for little kids. They call them “rugrats” because they crawl around on the rug, and I thought that was really funny. A couple of people were concerned people would think the show would be about rats, but we talked them into going with it.

JOE ANSOLABEHERE (Writer): When we were all being hired as writers, the first thing they wanted to know was, “Do you have a child?” Which is kind of a weird thing to ask a writer. That was coming from Arlene.

PAUL GERMAIN (Co-Creator): Some people had kids and some people didn’t. Arlene made a big deal about it because she thought of the show as being based on her kid, but I didn’t think that. We were modeling the characters and show on memories of being kids ourselves.

CRAIG BARTLETT (Writer; Creator, Hey Arnold!): Paul had a one-year-old – Tommy Germain – who would end up being Tommy Pickles.

LINDA SIMENSKY (Manager of Animation, Nickelodeon): Before that, Tommy’s name was Ollie.

PAUL GERMAIN (Co-Creator): “Pickles” was a name that just occurred to me.

CHERYL CHASE (Angelica): When they were getting things together, hiring artists and the creative team, I thought, “I’m in on something the world doesn’t know yet.” It’s a one shot in a million you get to be involved with something that affects pop culture.

PETER CHUNG (Director of Pilot/Opening Sequence): Everybody wanted the best looking show they could get, but I would get details coming from Gabor that were different from the details coming from Arlene. The notes I got from Arlene were largely about trying to not make it too scary. Gabor’s notes very often used the word “strange.” He wanted the babies to be “strange” instead of “cute.”

PAUL GERMAIN (Co-Creator): It all came from the storytelling: The designs came after the characters. And I created the characters – Tommy, Phil, Lil, Stu, Didi, Grandpa, Spike the Dog …

HOWARD BAKER (Director): When Chuck Swenson came on, we all became a little more organized. Whenever I needed help, Chuck was my first lifeline.

CHUCK SWENSON (Creative Producer): They were a really bright, young, energetic set of people. But nobody had ever done this before. Nobody had ever had a hand in getting a series up and running.

HOWARD BAKER (Director): I really had no idea how to direct a TV show and it became a learning-on-the-job experience. I would ask what we were going to do the next day, then call my friends over at The Simpsons to ask them what that was.

RAYMIE MUZQUIZ (Storyboard Artist/Director): Chuck arrived some time after production started, and it was my understanding that his role was to apply discipline to the production which was straining from the indulgences of Arlene and Paul.

CHUCK SWENSON (Creative Producer): What was supposed to be a couple days a week job for me as consultant became a seven-day-a-week job. I ran the picture part of the show. Paul Germain was the head writer, and together we made Rugrats.

E.G. DAILY (Tommy): When they showed me the claymation, the first voice that came out of me was this voice that I had been practicing my whole life that was the right kind of voice for that “look.” It just worked. It was a voice that I had started developing when I was a little girl. It was just a little boy character that kind of lives in me that I developed and wasn’t derived from anything in particular. I don’t know why. Just boy voices, anything boys is just really easy for me.

JACK RILEY (Stu): When I came into the studio, I noticed a lamp was sizzling, burning. I thought it was a sign from God. It was the right voice to use. And I got paid every once in a while.E.G. DAILY

MELANIE CHARTOFF (Didi/Grandma Minka): Didi was an amalgamation of Nervous Nelly mothers I knew in the ’90s, with the influence of my own mother’s higher voice atop that.

E.G. DAILY (Tommy): Rugrats was one of my first voice-over auditions, so I didn’t really know what to compare it to. They were actually replacing the girl they had used in the pilot. So I had to come in and re-dub the first few episodes and then … that was it. I didn’t have any expectations about it at all. It was sort of like, “Oh, cool. I booked this job.” It wasn’t until we started doing the show that we saw how brilliant it was.

STEVE VIKSTEN (Writer): I made Tommy more of an adventurer. I wrote the line, “A baby’s got to do what a baby’s got to do.” We were up late at Joe Ansolabehere’s and we were trying to write that episode. I was thinking about John Wayne.

CHERYL CHASE (Angelica): I auditioned for Tommy, Phil and Lil. I didn’t get it. Angelica hadn’t been created yet. There was a long period of time, and the Rugrats pilot was sold and they needed to create more characters. I auditioned for them and got Angelica. I was so excited. When I read the character breakdown and it said Angelica was three, I said, “What would a three-year-old sound like?” I used to do a lot of baby work – Baby Boom and Addams Family Values – where I would squeeze my vocal chords really tight and I’d sound like a baby. So I loosened up a little bit and it just came out. It’s just restricting your vocal chords.

CHUCK SWENSON (Creative Producer): Cheryl Chase was a secretary for [The Ren & Stimpy Show creator] John Kricfalusi when she was discovered.

CHERYL CHASE (Angelica): John needed a girl voice for his pilot and I think I got $25 for that. Then [Vice President of Animation, Nick Movies] Jerry Beck told me John needed a receptionist, and I said I needed a job. So that’s how that happened. I was also John’s casting director and go-to girl. He was very nice. I would work at Spumco all week, and on Fridays, there would be a four-hour period when John would let me go up the street to Klasky-Csupo where I would do Rugrats. I called Rugrats my “waitress job” because I still needed to work. It wasn’t paying enough.

STEVE VIKSTEN (Writer): I took Cheryl aside and said, “Youhave to be meaner to the babies. You have to really yell. Be furious!” And she said, “Really? Okay, I’ll try.” I told her she was the JR Ewing of Rugrats.

CRAIG BARTLETT (Writer; Creator, Hey Arnold!): I thought it would be funny if Angelica had a doll, a “Barbie” that she loved so much that it only had those little strands of hair sticking out. Beat-up, tortured. A test pilot in some exploded experiment. The original Cynthia design was mine. It was funny to me that Angelica’s telling Cynthia – this doll – all of this stuff and Cynthia had a blank, kind of glazed, long-suffering look on her face.

CHERYL CHASE (Angelica): Cynthia was hysterical. Every little girl had a doll like her in their lives. So did I. [Aerosmith frontman] Steven Tyler was at a Kids’ Choice Awards and they asked him who his favorite Rugrats character was, and he said Cynthia.

CRAIG BARTLETT (Writer; Co-Creator, Hey Arnold!): I did Reptar, as well. I had just done a job in Osaka, Japan installing a show at the Expo ’90 and had lived there for a couple of months. I was heavily under the influence of Japanese culture and got these great Godzilla toys when I was there. Toys in Japan are wonderful. “Reptar” just seemed right and was kind of a “monster”-name.

MARY HARRINGTON (Supervising Producer of Animation, Nickelodeon): One of my favorite Rugrats episodes was a Mother’s Day special that was going to address the fact that Chuckie didn’t have a mother. They probably thought it was forbidden territory at first. It was like, “Can we do that?” And it ended up being this beautiful episode.

MICHAEL BELL (Drew/Chaz/Grandpa Boris): There was a sequence when Chuckie thinks about his mother in the clouds and when I finished, I looked up and everybody in the booth was crying. Right down to the engineer. They asked me to do it again, but to peel it back a bit. I’d never heard that before – you go for the gold, you don’t go for the bronze. But I peeled it back. It was still moving but nowhere near as that first take.

E.G. DAILY (Tommy): I was in labor during an episode of Rugrats. Literally, I was recording and I was pregnant and I would do a line, and would go, “HOLD, PLEASE!” and have a contraction. And it was like, “Uggggh! … Okay, ready.” And then it was the engineers who would say, “You’re having a lot of contractions.” I didn’t think I was in labor quite yet and then I ended up going into labor later that night. So they have me on tape going into contractions doing Tommy. I have no idea which episode it was.

JOE ANSOLABEHERE (Writer): There was a thing called “Home Movies” where each of the babies draws their version of reality, and we actually went and got kids to draw pictures and animated off their designs. Angelica’s supposed to be three, so her drawing’s pretty good, then Chuckie’s drawing is whatever, and by the time you get to Tommy’s, it’s just a big dot. That’s all he can do. And he did this bit where he said, “This is me.” And he drew a dot. Then he said, “This is you, Chuckie.” And he drew a much bigger dot. “That’s me?” “You’re bigger than me, Chuckie.” That chokes me up because I love those guys so much. I know it’s stupid because they’re just drawings, but they were real to me by that point. We took it very seriously.

NORTON VIRGIEN (Director): It was a peak experience for me creating that episode. The idea emerged from a discussion my son – who was about seven or eight – had at the time. Because adults really can’t draw with the same naiveté as a child, we brought our kids together for a drawing session, from which we created the crayon art in the episode. Don’t tell the Animation Guild!

JOE ANSOLABEHERE (Writer): In the middle of Season Two, Steve Viksten came back to Rugrats after leaving for a while. I was instrumental in bringing him back. We had been writing partners, but now I was his boss, and it didn’t go over well. We started having these personal fights, and during one, I told him he couldn’t go away for six months and then come back and expect to be on the same level. And he said, “I had other things to do. Important things to do.” I said, “Steve, this might be the best show we ever get a chance to work on.” And he said, “I hope not.” But somewhere in that second season, I started believing we were doing something great. Maybe it was true and maybe it wasn’t, but I’d look at these sitcoms and say, “These are stupid! I’m telling more interesting stories in 11 minutes than they’re telling in 22!”

From Paul Germain: “This group photo was taken immediately after a recording session in 1991 or 1992 for the Rugrats episode, ‘Graham Canyon,’ written by Craig Bartlett, and voice directed by me. TOP ROW (from L to R): Craig, Melanie Chartoff, Pat Buttram (who played a sneaky auto mechanic in the episode). MIDDLE ROW: Jack Riley, me, David Doyle. BOTTOM ROW: Michael Bell, and Bee Beckman (a line producer on the series). “Photo Credit: Paul Germain

Mathew Klickstein lost his mind interviewing more than 250 VIPs from the early days of the First Kids Network for SLIMED! An Oral History of Nickelodeon’s Golden Age. Fortunately, he was able to salvage a few last neurons for the forthcoming Marc Summers documentary, On Your Marc, and the new podcast, NERTZ. Find out more about Klickstein’s shenanigans here.